Equation 2 · Part 9 · What Actually Happens Inside a Very Long Claude Context Window
superscript
superscript
What this part means
A raised number can be a power. When it is a label or bound, it selects a case or the upper limit of a sum; the formula’s structure distinguishes these uses.
Its job in the formula
A raised mark can be a power or an index. Its position and the surrounding notation determine which.
Full expression→superscript→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
Anthropic’s own engineering guidance, published in September 2025 as advice for developers building long-running agents, gives the clearest available first-party account of why context rot happens architecturally rather than treating it as an unexplained empirical curiosity [ 4 ] . The explanation rests on the transformer’s core mechanism: every token attends to every other token in the context through self-attention, so the number of pairwise relationships the model must represent grows with the square of the sequence length. For a context of n tokens, the compute spent by self-attention within a single layer scales as . where d is the model’s hidden dimension. Doubling…
Learn the underlying idea
An exponent tells how a base is used in multiplication. In x³, x is the base and 3 is the exponent: x³ = x × x × x.
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.